Religion Dispatches
…s and no white flour. I’m still working my way to having six small meals a day, right now I’m at about five. I also included two brisk half-hour walks each day, when I can make them. The morning walk is less of a challenge, even when I have my grandson. In fact, especially when I have my grandson, because I push him in the stroller. He usually takes his morning nap around that time, and the walk eases him into it with less fuss. Pushing the stroll…
Read More…erse. I started my study of Arabic on my own, learning the alphabet in two days. Every day I would read an Arabic exercise book from cover to cover. One part of it was pronunciation exercises, leading to words, leading to sentences, and the other part was the last juz’ of the Qur’an. I read it every day after morning prayer. I also started memorizing chapters of the Qur’an: one each week, until the fall semester rolled around and I could at long l…
Read More…oduce the world’s thinnest people: they’d eat it all back during the three-day celebration. And that’s what is should be: three days of celebration. The part that puts the ‘holy’ into the holiday is also the most uniformly practiced: the prayer on the morning of the first day after the new moon has been cited, salatul-’Id. This will be the largest gathering of Muslim worshippers at any one time per neighborhood. In Indonesia and Cairo, we prayed o…
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…much like the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been concealing and facilitating the sexual abuse of children and other vulnerable church members for years. The Mormon Church, like the Roman Catholic Church, has fought its way into the mainstream, bettered its cultural standing, and expanded its political influence by doubling down on white supremacy, misogyny, and homophobia. It’s important to clarify tha…
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…irtual bouquets to funders, donors, advisors, board members and colleagues who offered assistance in many shapes and sizes. And big hugs to three women who kept everything on track: Ellie Faustino, Anita Little and Ginger Mayerson. Religion Dispatches provides insight and information on today’s most pressing issues. It does that by taking seriously the ethical, spiritual and theological dimensions of our political and social lives. Its voice is un…
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…o work, and that it’s time for the bankers to abandon their claims on everyday people’s futures. I will leave it to another [on this day] to think about what this means practically or what policies we should adopt as a country. For today, we should think about the moral content of promises, oaths, commitments, and pledges. Is it right to follow through on these? Is it right to own another’s future? The Kol Nidre service opens with a statement decl…
Read More…ond by reading it. McGrath writes of a Florida pastor who has set aside Sunday, Sept. 12 and is encouraging a mass reading: Presumably everyone has heard by now that a group of “Christians” in Florida is planning a Qur’an-burning event on the anniversary of 9/11. (Apparently they are also planning to burn the Talmud, which was news to me—will they be protesting the end of Rosh ha-Shanah?!). Stephen Prothero has called for moderate Christians to sp…
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…In this second installment of reports from the Cornerstone Christian music festival [watch the first installment here] Gabe McKee talks about why hardcore Christian musicians tend to be conservative and something he didn’t think he’d find……
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…nts of halacha around the world struggled to identify them. It took just a day for an American Orthodox Jewish Web site, Vos Iz Neias, to offer “a grand prize to the first reader who is able to correctly identify all five issurim (prohibitions) associated with eating a cockroach in the Knesset cafeteria.” A day after that the Web site had posted—in Hebrew, Aramaic and English translations—the biblical and Talmudic citations that forbid the consump…
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…In this final installment of Gabe McKee’s video trinity (watch days one and two), our intrepid man-on-the-scene defines “Goreship” music, reports on the “Punk Monks” of the “Death to the World” movement, and answers the age old question about Christian death metal: Do appreciative fans do the sign of the horns? Watch the 3 minute video (apologies for erratic audio toward the end but should still be audible):…
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